Courtesy - Atlassian

Jira - Restoring Issue Family Hierarchy

Atlassian Jira Cloud is an integral part of so many businesses today. Easy to set up and get started, it enables businesses to streamline their work management workflows. Originally designed as a Bug & Issue tracker tool, Today Jira covers a broader spectrum of use cases such as tools for Agile teams, Project management, Product management, Process management, Task management.

Such versatility of Jira is a blessing for the IT team to address their internal customers requirements via one tool. While various problems are addressed by Jira, it can also bring in complexity to manage the system itself along with its data. 

Data protection challenges faced by Jira admins

Jira admins have been facing data consistency issues due to several reasons, be it accidental or malicious events. Commonly, Jira admins have reported the following scenarios of data corruption which keep them awake at night.

• Lack of data protection strategy & awareness
  • Learn more about SaaS Shared Responsibility Model
• Merger of Jira sites due to M&A, company restructuring etc
• Migration from on premise Server to Cloud version of Jira
• Jira cloud instance cleanup
• Human error in daily administration & operations - Incorrect updates to individual issues or bulk updates.
• Disgruntled employees deleting or updating Plans, Epics, Stories, Tasks & Attachments
• Malicious attacks
• Bad data seeding & replication in Sandbox resulting in poor testing

One of the admins I spoke to told me, during the merger of Jira sites a lot of existing Epics were impacted due to configuration changes. First of all, there was no clear way to identify the blast radius. Beyond that there was no way to perform a granular restore of the impacted Epics only.

Another incident I heard was, the Jira admin was working on sanitizing the Scrum reports and wanted to update a subset of issues.  A few JQL queries were used wherein some filters were incorrect and overall the bulk change result was not what he expected. In this situation he wanted to simply get a second copy of the same Epics from the older snapshots, this way he could easily compare the fields using JQL before making any changes to the existing issues in production. 

From my brief discussion with so many customers and Jira consultants, it became clear that this is not a one-off issue but these things can happen to anyone, in any environment and it is not that rare at all. 

How can Revyz help?

At Revyz we decided to address this problem and make Jira admin’s life better. Over last weekend we released an early access restore feature which effectively helps Jira admins restore a specific Issue along with its family hierarchy as it appeared in a given point-in-time snapshot. 

Benefits of ‘Restore Issue family’ feature

• Selecting & restoring specific Epics can automatically get you all the Epics & children underneath it.
• Selecting & restoring specific child issues such as Stories or Sub-tasks can automatically create its parent hierarchy without you having to remember and select those issues during the restore process.
• Restore targeted Epics or Issues, no need to revert entire site.
• Shorter restore time due to targeted dataset.
• Verbose job details along with issue key mapping for simplified tracking.
• Verbose logging along with status codes for power users.

Enterprise grade functionality

Revyz team believes in empowering admins by building a highly customizable product for Enterprise use cases. As part of that philosophy we have made new settings completely configurable. The ‘Restore Issue family’ settings can be completely tweaked as per your requirements. 

How does ‘Restore Issue family’ feature work?

Let’s take a look at it. By default after installing Revyz Backup & Restore app for Jira, it will automatically backup all issues, projects and configuration on a daily basis. 

• For example TIS-2 is the Epic with the following Issue family hierarchy, which is backed up by Revyz on a daily basis.

• Normally, if you lost TIS-2 along with its stories, you have the following options. Given the use case, both of these options may not be practical for the majority of the customers.
• Using Revyz you can restore specific issues, but you are expected to recall details of all issues which are to be restored. 
• If you use Jira’s native import-export solution
• Revert the entire site to an older snapshot and get all the stories in this Epic. 
• Lose recent data in this process

• Don't worry, now with the help of the new ‘Restore Issue Family’ feature you can define the behavior of the restore process and how it manages the Issue family hierarchy. Once configured as desired it can automatically restore all the parent/children based on the global ‘Restore Settings’ available under ‘Settings’

• Simply go to Revyz Advanced Restore view -> Create issues -> Add filters -> Restore preview -> Select Epic TIS-2 and trigger the restore.

• Once the restore is initiated, the job would look like this:

• Here you can see, the entire Epic along with its children was restored when just Epic was selected for restoration. 

• Similar to the above mentioned use case, this feature also helps with Child to Parent hierarchy recreation. 

Conclusion

Implementing Data protection strategy for Atlassian Jira cloud has become a necessity and equally complex. With limited native options from Atlassian, you will have to either build some custom scripts, manage data on your own to address your data protection needs or you leverage 3rd party SaaS applications such as Revyz to offload data protection from your core IT team.

Revyz Backup & Restore app for Jira can store data securely & remotely, making it available for various recovery scenarios without having you to rollback the entire site.

Try Revyz for free - Atlassian marketplace link.  Share your feedback on how we can improve & what other use cases you would want Revyz to address.

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